Weatherford College Old Main Building

The school in this wing went through several names. The Handbook of Texas says Phoenix Lodge of the Masons won a charter in 1869 for a Masonic Institute, though classes began two or three years later. In 1884 it became Cleveland College, for President Grover Cleveland. In 1889 the Methodist conference moved Granbury College here and merged the two as Weatherford College. It turned junior college in 1921, helped by the estates of J. R. Couts and Edward D. Farmer. Southwestern University ran it from 1944, and the county took it over in 1949.

What the plaque says

Weatherford College Old Main Building This wing, Old Weatherford Masonic Institute, always has been part of a school. Masons en route to lay the cornerstone, July 5, 1869, were delayed by a skirmish with Indians. Incorporated into main building of Weatherford College 1895. Has educated many Texans. (1964)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 1.2 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 15 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 21 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Governor S.W.T. Lanham — 0.9 mi
• Parker County, C.S.A. — 1.2 mi
• Weatherford — 1.2 mi
• Prince Memorial CME Church — 1.2 mi